As Mark Frauenfelder said over at Boing Boing, “It’s an AP story, so I am guessing this astonishing photo is legit.”

Jamison Stone, 11 years old, shot the wild boar that weighed in at a “staggering 1,051 pounds and measured 9-feet-4 from the tip of its snout to the base of its tail.”

The boy was hunting with his father Mike Stone in east Alabama on May 3, 2007, when he killed Hogzilla II, with a .50- caliber revolver. They chased it for three hours before it died in a creek bed on the 2,500-acre Lost Creek Plantation, a commercial hunting preserve in Delta, Alabama. There is nothing cryptozoo about this at all. Were they shooting a boar in a barrel?

Stone and his father realize the fame that lies ahead. After all, there’s a movie being made called “Hogzilla” about the hog given that name because it was big, but not as big as this one.

About Loren ColemanLoren Coleman is one of the world’s leading cryptozoologists, some say “the” leading living cryptozoologist. Certainly, he is acknowledged as the current living American researcher and writer who has most popularized cryptozoology in the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
Starting his fieldwork and investigations in 1960, after traveling and trekking extensively in pursuit of cryptozoological mysteries, Coleman began writing to share his experiences in 1969. An honorary member of Ivan T. Sanderson’s Society for the Investigation of the Unexplained in the 1970s, Coleman has been bestowed with similar honorary memberships of the North Idaho College Cryptozoology Club in 1983, and in subsequent years, that of the British Columbia Scientific Cryptozoology Club, CryptoSafari International, and other international organizations. He was also a Life Member and Benefactor of the International Society of Cryptozoology (now-defunct).
Loren Coleman’s daily blog, as a member of the Cryptomundo Team, served as an ongoing avenue of communication for the ever-growing body of cryptozoo news from 2005 through 2013. He returned as an infrequent contributor beginning Halloween week of 2015.
Coleman is the founder in 2003, and current director of the International Cryptozoology Museum in Portland, Maine.

If I had this thing, I’d mount it AND make sausage, as they seem to be doing. Might as well make the most of it. Of course, a lot of people claim taxidermied specimens can be stretched, so I imagine the debate will continue.

And yeah, Remus has a point about sausage. Probably the best use for it. I’ve been to 2 pig roasts, and they were both big bull males, and boy was that meat terrible! But if they’d’ve ground them up, mixed in a few veggies and spices and slipped them into an intestinal lining, they’d probably have made some mighty fine links…